Big Carbon

posted at 6:52 pm on August 6, 2012 by J.E. Dyer

So, how’s that carbon-trading thing going? Big Carbon set up shop in the European Union in 2005, and is scheduled to make its North American-franchise debut in California in January. How goes the trade?

Eurozombie

The answer in Europe is: not well. Carbon trading is a zombie in Europe. It’s going to start eating flesh pretty soon. It’s on a rampage stirring up the airline industry overseas right now (on which more later), but its “life” inside the Union is creepy and inverted.

Since the inauguration of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), 97 percent of emissions certificates – “permits” to emit carbon dioxide – have been given away to commercial users. The certificates actually being sold were going for over 14 euros each in 2010, but their price has fallen by 60% in the last year. The stock exchange in Bavaria closed its ETS trading operation on 30 June, due in part to its pointlessness.

What this means, just to be clear, is that there isn’t enough demand for any of the things you have to buy carbon permits for to justify buying them. If you can get them for free, great. But if you have to pay for them, you can’t earn enough to make that worthwhile.

Starting in 2013, however, European power generating companies will have to buy all their permits. Consumer rates and prices in general will therefore go up. Germany, with the continent’s biggest economy, is also reportedly planning to cut the number of permit freebies by 56 percent next year, which will force more businesses to pay for their permits.

To be clear, one more time: From 2005 to 2012, the EU economies have not had to absorb the full cost of carbon trading. Three percent out of 100 is not representative of the actual scope of the cost. The EU hasn’t truly implemented ETS, so the record to date is not an indicator of what will happen when ETS is being paid for by everyone. (That said, the estimated cost to the European consumer so far was about 210 billion euros as of mid-2011 – for zero reduction in carbon emissions.)

We have learned what a boon ETS can be for fraudsters. Ingenious criminals have been buying up permits and charging a VAT when they sell them in another country, but pocketing the VAT revenue instead of handing it over the authorities. The fraud has amounted to billions of euros.

Airlines are warning the EU that the airline carbon tax will drive away business and stifle economic growth, but of course, the airlines are just hateful, racist, capitalist fat-cats who only care about killing old ladies and puppies with evil profits. (Interestingly, the ETS giveaways have set up a number of European companies with big stockpiles of carbon credits, which they can theoretically sell someday for a profit, if anyone wants to buy them. As described at the JoNova link in the third paragraph, enterprising Irish power producers have already passed on their future carbon-credit costs to their consumers. They’ve been getting the giveaways that will end in 2013. The Irish parliament, appalled at this, added a profits tax to keep the power producers in their place. Naturally, the option of simply not doing any of this doesn’t occur to anyone.)

The UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is tied closely to the EU ETS, getting much of its cash from ETS sales to the disadvantaged carbon emitters: the three percenters who haven’t been getting freebies up to now. The problem with the nascent “global market” in carbon offsets is that it, like the EU market, is vastly oversupplied. The CDM works as follows:

[G]overnments and companies in developed countries can earn emissions offsets (CERs) by investing in low-carbon projects in developing countries. They can use the credits to achieve their Kyoto targets.

We may note that the way CDM works doesn’t reduce the carbon emitted into the atmosphere, it just induces investment money into low-carbon projects in developing countries. Investing in this manner is counted as a reduction in carbon emissions, even though that’s not what it is. This is basically a whole bunch of snake oil.

But interest in it has flagged dramatically anyway. Emissions offsets, called CERs under the CDM scheme, have lost 70% of their value in the last year.

You have to be really, really stinking-drunk rich to play pretend with carbon trading, and fewer and fewer nations (or states) can afford it with each passing month.

California’s big adventure

So what’s the overextended, under-revenued state of California planning to do? That’s right: open its carbon-credit market for business in 2013. Oh, and Quebec is joining in California’s suicidal plunge. Eight US Western states that were originally signed up for the Western Climate Initiative (the state-chartered operator of the carbon-credit exchange) have dropped out, but Quebec – on the other side of the continent – is hanging tough.

Governor Jerry Brown and his carbon bean-counters have already baked $1 billion in projected carbon-credit revenue into his 2012-13 budget proposal. That’s an optimistic projection, to be sure, but a characteristic one. In the Unhatched Chickens Sweepstakes, the state also assumed $1.9 billion in revenue from the Facebook IPO (I’m not kidding) for the same budget proposal. And those two highly risky assumptions still leave California with a $16 billion current deficit on paper.

The case for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and/or climate change has fallen apart on examination so far. Therefore, the whole carbon-trading scheme is based on a false premise. It is an excellent moral lesson that nothing can go right with a policy that is based on falsifying and misrepresenting data. From criminal fraud to tremendous loss of putative value in the exchange unit, this is what you get when you impose artificial requirements that meet no valid real-world need on the people. Nothing good can ever come of it – and this has been, so far, only a very small dose. Any bigger ones will be much worse.

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Comments

Arguably CO2 has -nothing- to do with the climate. There is zero empirical evidence that it effects climate scale temperatures; all there is is an arguable ambiguous theoretical model, no evidence. See (and share) this 3 minute video excerpt from The Great Global Warming Swindle that exposes the IPCC deception on CO2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&info=GGWarmingSwindle_CO2Lag

I have the perfect solution. It will kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Issue plastic bags, large enough to cover ones head with, to all those who believe in man made global warming. Instruct them to place the bags over their heads, tying them off tightly around the neck. Voila! Local CO2 emissions are curtailed and the loud irritating noise that ususally accompanies those emissions are quited. Overall, man mad co2 emissions are reduced nearly immediately. Test scores in schools will improve and so will the general life of everyone.

The CCX was set up in 2000 in anticipation of the United States joining Europe and other countries around the world to create a market that would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Under the system, factories, utilities and other businesses would be given an emissions target. Those that emitted less fewer regulated gases than their target could sell the “excess” to someone who was above target. Each year, the target figures would be reset lower.

The Exchange was the brainchild of Richard Sandor, an economist and professor at Northwestern University, and it was modeled after a successful program that was launched in 1990 and helped control acid rain in the Midwest. It was initially funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Joyce Foundation of Chicago, and President Obama was a board member at the time.

Press Release
London, 6 August: The Global Warming Policy Foundations has warned policy makers that wind energy is an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions. In fact, there is a significant likelihood that annual CO2 emissions could be greater under the Government’s current wind strategy than under an alternative Gas scenario.

Professor Gordon Hughes (University of Edinburgh), on behalf of the GWPF, has also assessed the likely impact of wind power on household energy bills.

In his economic analysis, submitted by the GWPF to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, Prof Hughes concludes that meeting the Government’s target for renewable generation would increase households electricity bills by 40-60% by 2020.

Anthony Watts and others have posted a new paper showing that half of the warming “recorded” by thermometers in the US is fabricated or false, a combination of poorly sited thermometer stations (over blacktop or concrete, near buildings, near air conditioning vents blowing hot air, etc, as well as stations that have had uban areas grow up around them, with all their associated Urban Heat Island effect), and of “adjustments” to records that push temps down in the early-mid 1900′s, and push them up in the late 1900′s.

No, they will just make the manufactures of the said wind mills buy the credits, which of course will make the price of making said wind mills even MORE expensive, therefor making power even more expensive for the end user… its a big circle and there will be winners and looser… sadly, people like me and you will be on the loss side of things while we eat by candle light.

Solyndra is the most perfect crime ever followed by this crime.If a company exceeds their emissions and buys credits to offset the limit how does this reduce emissions?The only thing reduced is bank accounts.

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What’s coming out of the stacks? Water vapor, just like the cooling towers at the nuke plants. There are electrostatic precipitators, bag houses and scrubbers that clean the exhaust from power plants. Precipitators and bag houses take the particulates out of the exhaust and the exhaust is further drawn through water to take out the acid, which is sulfuric and sold as a by product. The particulate matter is also sold and used in other products.

the globe has not warmed at all in the last 20 years, but has cooled slightly

Sure. If you take Jones’ quotes in the 2-1/2 year old article at their face value (completely out of context) and listen to the Heatland spokesperson (who isn’t a scientist, and therefore has no clue).

Check the data, compiled and analyzed by experts.

BTW, the arctic is in full melt-down, massively suppressing the albedo effect, fueling the positive-feedback of warming.

And you might want to read what Richard Muller, the one that climate change denialists quoted endlessly, now says after careful analysis of data.

Ding ding! We have a winner. You obviously know more basic chemistry than anybody at Hot Gas, who keeps displaying pictures of steam, when writing about “carbon.” Come to think of it, “carbon” would have a hard time rising out of smokestacks, also.

Governor Jerry Brown and his carbon bean-counters have already baked $1 billion in projected carbon-credit revenue into his 2012-13 budget proposal.
…
This agency that’s going to implement policy on taxing carbon emissions gets to meet in secret, without public scrutiny, to make its decisions.
…
the whole carbon-trading scheme is based on a false premise. It is an excellent moral lesson that nothing can go right with a policy that is based on falsifying and misrepresenting data. From criminal fraud to tremendous loss of putative value in the exchange unit, this is what you get when you impose artificial requirements that meet no valid real-world need on the people.

And CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) is at best a speculation, not even a falsifiable hypothesis, and certainly not a ‘theory’.

Actually, CAGW is best described as a dogma.

This will be the destroyer of the world economy and launch us “Forward” into the 18th century.

freedomfirst on August 6, 2012 at 6:56 PM

The best way to put the kibosh on this is to elect conservative Republicans to the House and Senate. Now if only we could find a solid candidate to get my Representative, the execrable Ed Malarkey, out of the House, this would be a happy November.